Pine Hall, the rooftop tavern that crowns the Hudson’s office block, is a much-needed addition to Detroit’s dining scene — and a testament that Detroit’s dining scene doesn’t need much.
Located on the 12th floor of the office block building (the low-rise beside the prominent Hudson's tower), in the eye of downtown Detroit, it’s the kind of place to grab a drink before or after a show, a game or a work conference. It’s the kind of place where bar food can be more than wings and burgers and fries — though there are crunchy, battered boneless wings, there is a great burger that bursts with savory juice and fries are thin, crisp and seasoned in a malt vinegar salt.
There’s no official happy hour — don’t expect specials on drinks or food — but visit
Pine Hall at the golden hour when the Detroit skyline eclipses the sun and you’re sure to experience happiness.
Like a watchtower, Pine Hall hovers above Woodward Avenue, offering sweeping views of an ever-changing city. See Belle Isle, Comerica Park, Ford Field and the Detroit River from the wrap-around patio. Visit often enough and you might begin to witness the new businesses, residences, monuments and installations that sprout between the landmarks. Seated anywhere on the patio, it might feel as though you’re on top of the world. In a sense, you are — or at the very least, you’re on top of the city.
But Pine Hall is more than a great view.
The menu here shows a sincere commitment to a high-caliber food and beverage program without pretense. It's a tavern where British pub grub and Midwestern flair shake hands.
A deviled egg trio tops whipped yolks with smoky towers of chopped bacon. Sausage rolls fold English sausage, made in house, into buttery puff pastries like savory rugelach. A salad of spring greens, spicy radishes and crushed hazelnuts piggybacks on Michigan trout. Butterflied and barely visible, the fish tail peeks out from under the colorful roughage.
Snacks like deviled eggs and sausage rolls are humble enough to be made at home, yet the sort of dishes that can draw skepticism outside of your home. Sweaty shells give deviled eggs a bad rap, and savory pastries can call to mind items from the frozen food aisle. At Pine Hall, these simple dishes are well executed, elevated beyond the expectation of traditional bar bites. Food here is competent, not ambitious. Well done, not wow-worthy.
Pine Hall is deliberately derivative of establishments in its bloodline without literal interpretation. The interior here, with its wooden paneling, calls back to The Pine Room, the wood-clad dining room at the Hudson’s department store in the ’30s. Meals, though, are less offal and retro — passing over chopped chicken giblets, sweetbread patty à la king and deviled egg in aspic.
Menu items are seasonal, an integral characteristic of New York City's Gramercy Tavern, the prided outfit of Union Square Hospitality Group, the operating partner of Pine Hall and brainchild of the hospitality magnate Danny Meyer. At the height of summer, sweet corn was rolled into balls the size of donut holes and fried into golden fritters, bursting with starch and heat from slivers of jalapeno.
The most anticipated menu item is a fixture at Pine Hall. The Maurice Salad is a nostalgic addition for Hudson’s faithfuls with memories of the iceberg lettuce salad that defined a generation. Much was lost with the implosion of the department store in 1998, the Maurice Salad, arguably, the most significant culinary loss. In the decades that followed, chefs, restaurants, food publications and home cooks made their own attempts to recreate it. Now, Pine Hall takes a shot.
It’s a close interpretation, but not on the nose. There are snappy gherkins and slivers of turkey, ham and cheese, like a medley of ticker tape. But it’s tart, and lacks the sweet notes of the original. Here, the gherkins are pungent, the dressing is citrusy, the cheese smoky — Pine Hall replaces Swiss with Gruyère — and bitter chicories are incorporated, adding a depth of flavor the original lacked. For my mother-in-law, a former Hudson’s department store employee who’d spent many lunch breaks hunched over a Maurice Salad, Pine Hall’s version is tasty, but doesn’t compare to her memory of the original.
It can’t be overstated what Hudson’s meant to Detroit. In its more than 90 years downtown, the department store was the tallest in the country. Beyond The Pine Room and its offcuts and retro dishes ― beyond the Maurice Salad ― Hudson’s dining establishments served an average of 10,000 meals a day. In these eateries, rituals were established and memories were made. The very flag that once hung on the façade of the building was such an emblem of the city that it changed hands a number of times over in an attempt to preserve a sliver of Americana. There is significance in taking up real estate at the Hudson’s site.
There are some areas of Pine Hall that feel more like kitsch than nostalgia. On their own, artifacts from the old Hudson’s site are endearing. A poster for a Hudson’s credit card greets you off the elevator. An old employee magazine titled “The Hudsonian,” dated 1967 looks over your shoulder as you make your way into the dining room. Compounded with menu items like bumpy cake and a Boston Cooler, the hail-yesteryear theme can make Pine Hall feel something like a Michigan tribute bar designed for transplants in another city.
For discriminating palates, the bumpy cake, piped with velvety buttercream in racing stripes atop a moist devil’s food cake, outperforms Sanders’ boxed version, and the Boston Cooler is decidedly Michiganian, made with Vernors and smooth vanilla soft serve. The tributes are undeniably honorable.
Danny Meyer has a deep reverence for his Midwestern roots. With Pine Hall, the St. Louis native, in partnership with Dan Gilbert's commercial real estate firm Bedrock, aimed to create a space with a harmony of nostalgia and forward thinking.
“We want to capture the heritage of Detroit, and at the same time, we don't want to open as a relic or a museum,” he told me in January. “Hopefully, when you go there, you will say: ‘These guys did their homework. They honor where this all came from and they're going to hopefully be good citizens for its future.’”
Still, the Shake Shack founder is anchored in New York City, where he’s spent his career building establishments like Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, which each draw east coasts diners and tourists from across the globe. And in a sense, it shows. Altogether, Midwest charm at Pine Hall can have the hokey air of Midwest perception through the lens of an outsider.
Not even Danny Meyer, with his hospitality acumen, can rescue Detroit from its service challenges — in fairness, a challenge for many restaurants, across many cities.
My first visit, I was awkwardly instructed to sit in a very specific seat on a lobby bench as I waited my turn to be seated upstairs — the restaurant is largely walk-in only, operating on a first come, first-served basis, and there were a few diners ahead of me. Guests can make a reservation ahead of time, but these are often booked weeks out depending on your party size.
My second visit, our server vanished for 45 minutes just before we were ready for dessert, with no notice that he was scheduled for a break. When he returned, he placed blame on another server for not stepping in to notify us of the shift change.
Another attempt to nab a seat at the restaurant proved entirely ineffective. The first day of a new waitlist system for the restaurant indicated that there were 47 guests ahead of me. It would be at least 30 minutes before that number hit 46. I ventured to a nearby restaurant in less demand, and had my pick of seating options.
This doesn’t account for the steak and potato dish that was served without the promised whipped butter — just a ramekin of bacon bits beside a lonely, chapped potato. Or the delicious blackened salmon, the skin perfectly crisp, the flesh gloriously moist ― but served without the rye crisps described on the menu. Or the overcooked peel-and-eat shrimp dusted in Old Bay Seasoning. Or the carta di musica ― a paper-thin Italian cracker ― that more accurately resembles the Firehookrosemary sea salt crackers I buy from Whole Foods.
Still, we need a place like Pine Hall in Detroit. We deserve a place where tavern food offers more than a Bavarian pretzel — though there is a jumbo, warm, buttered pretzel, and it’s divine, at once chewy and so fresh out of the oven it burns your fingertips. I’ll caution that this very-good pretzel is also a $19 pretzel.
Despite some imperfections, everything is just fine at Pine Hall. In many ways, it shimmers. It smaller ways, there’s room for improvement. But overall, it brings memorable dining back to Hudson’s, and that might be all we ever needed.
3000 Nick Gilbert Way, Detroit. 313-612-8150; pinehall.com
Contact Detroit Free Press Dining and Restaurant Critic Lyndsay C. Green at: LCGreen@freepress.com. Follow @LadyLuff on Instagram and Twitter. Subscribe to the Eat Drink Freep newsletter for extras and insider scoops on Detroit-area dining.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Hudson's rooftop tavern Pine Hall gives Detroit dining spot it needed
